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An extended trip to Palestine can be a recipe for despair. How else to respond to the forcible evictions, home demolitions and nighttime arrests routinely reported on social media, or witnessed first hand by the intrepid journalist or political tourist? Despair has an antidote: the realization that what brought down apartheid South Africa will also bring an end to the more advanced and sophisticated Israeli version. More and more people are heeding the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. David Harel is one of these — albeit in nuanced fashion.

Interviews that go sideways, or south. They tend to end suddenly, in response to the question that shouldn’t have been asked. Such was the case in this conversation with Ha’aretz columnist Amira Hass, in response to a question Amira didn’t let me finish, about the international community’s declared, though deceitful support for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Thankfully, our conversation continued. Very lively.

The fortieth anniversary of America’s hasty retreat from Vietnam is upon us. A true memetic moment, that frantic, April 25, 1975 escape from the US Embassy rooftop is engraved in popular consciousness. The toxic legacy of the war is less known.

This coming spring will mark the twenty-second anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. An estimated eight hundred thousand were killed by ethnic Hutu extremists armed with knives, hoes and machetes. Over the radio, venom flowed.

For those who speak and write non-Latin languages, being able to type on a ‘standard’ computer keyboard is a major barrier to digital democracy. In Cambodia, this problem has been solved and communities are going wireless.

It’s hard to imagine a development tool more powerful than a radio station. For the past few years, a little station called FADECO has been promoting rural development in the community of Karagwe, in northwest Tanzania.

To comprehend the obstacles that need to be overcome if peace and justice are to be achieved in the Middle East, one must spend time in the West Bank and Gaza, listening to Palestinians describe their hardships. The Israeli occupation is particularly egregious for youth, who — like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — feel seriously misunderstood.